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| On the improvement of games by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 06/02/2012, 2:52am PDT | ||||
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Jerry Whorebach wrote: This sounds too much like complaining that Citizen Kane lacks color, stereo sound and director commentary on the DVD. (I'm not sure if Orson Welles was still alive when DVDs became popular, or when they started having additional material like director commentary, alternate scenes and so on.) The games as they were then were cutting edge at the time they were written. In fact, all of the enhancements you're mentioning came about because other gamers thought of enhancements to make the game play easier, more responsive, fun, and a better overall experience. That these functions then became standard because they were useful is a result of improvements in the capacity of the technology. DOOM, when it was written, was designed for machines barely above a 386; in fact, some people claimed that the original DOOM was unplayable on a 386. Which was true, if you were playing deathmatch or coop on a much faster machine than a 386 where the other person was running the lesser machine; if you had similar hardware as the other guy or were playing standalone you never noticed the difference. As hardware got better the things that could be done with that hardware increased, leading to a "virtuous circle" in which more capacity and more new features made it possible to implement additional functionality. I think it was reported that once someone got the idea to implement a scripting language into the run-time library for Half-Life 2 it gave the game designers a lot more options and ideas they hadn't thought of before, because they no longer needed to request the application be rebuilt to add new functions, they could now code them into the game level and run them directly. Better AI performance, scripting of responses, scripting of the way an AI moves, addition of commentary, allowing AI to give different reactions based on what is happening in the game at a particular moment (in some parts of the game, if Gordon is traveling with others, and one of them is a medic, if Gordon's health gets low the medic will offer him a health pack.) You can buy a really decent 30FPS webcam with zero install requirement from Radio Shack for 20 bucks; it was the packaging indicating that it was true plug-and-play and the camera works immediately without installing anything that convinced me to buy it over one from, say, Micro Center for perhaps $10. And it does exactly what was promised. I plugged it in, the system recognized it, and I could immediately use it with Skype. It included installable software, but this was not necessary to use the camera, it just added extra functions, like a program to use the webcam as a video camera, and save the footage into an editable file (as opposed to using it merely as a live streaming device.) So once video camera technology becomes more-or-less standardized like this and becomes cheap enough or ubiquitous enough that it's included in most PCs - the way my keyboard has a volume control knob plus multimedia buttons - then we might see introduction of use of a video camera into a game as part of the functionality. Perhaps your avatar is your actual face, possibly with movement. Or putting video chat into a combat sim, so that you and a bunch of others can see each other and can decide how you're going to attack. (Of course, then, instead of audio incidents, you can get video versions of the infamous LEEEEEEEEEEROY JENNNNNNNNNKINS attack.) Then people will look back at games that are so lame as to fail to include real-time video chat in them as old. But the addition of new and exciting technology to play with isn't restricted just to games. BBC World Service radio had a report about a new capacity for doctors. The adding of computer-accessible imaging into operating rooms makes it much easier for surgeons, who can now see all the X-Rays or MRI images at the time they're performing the surgery. Before, you had to handle lots of X-Ray sheets and move them on and off a back-lighted display, basically a 1930s technology lightbox. This capacity to access all images they have of a patient is a real time saver and reduces having to go through unimportant (the X-Rays of the guy's hip are unimportant if you're doing a reconstruction of his knee) images or miss important ones. Only problem is that the doctor has to remove their gloves to operate the PC, then put fresh gloves on to resume the operation. Now, there's research being done using the Kinect video camera system to allow doctors to use a PC with gestures similar to the video interface idea used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report so that doctors don't even have to touch a PC to be able to get real-time access to the patient's information and be able to use it while performing surgery. |
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